Fountain
by Jayne Foyer
Summary: Petra writes Martel essays through Val's old Demosthenes accounts. She comes upon an encrypted file, and discovers a letter Valentine kept hidden for years. Peter considers it an accusation. Petra calls it a kindness.


**"And do you know why you don't mean it?" Valentine asked. "Because you want to be in the government someday. you want to be elected. And they won't elect you if your opponents can dig up the fact that your brother and sister died in suspicious accidents when they were little. Especially because of the letter I've put in my secret file, whcih will be opened in the event of my death… It says, I didn't die a natural death. Peter killed me, and if he hasn't already killed Andrew, he will soon."**

**-****_Ender's Game_**

Sometimes Petra wrote a sentence and had to give herself a few minutes, staring at the words before her. She knew what she was writing and she knew why, but that didn't mean that she had to divorce herself from all empathy and – what was it? Guilt, maybe – that Islamophobic propaganda bred in her. It was better than doing nothing, but it was also not better than most things. So she was not grateful to Peter for giving her this assignment. But nor was she proud that she had taken it.

There was an odd, not uncomfortable movement in her belly. Calm down, baby. You have months to go yet. She stood, and moved into the bathroom, turning to the side to examine her profile. Her stomach was swollen, but her baby bump was still just that: a bump. And yet the child in her belly moved and wriggled in its warm enclosure. More so, she thought, than babies usually did at this point. Her heartbeat seemed to slow as she thought this, meeting her own dark eyes in the mirror. Small, but with a body developing perfectly. A tiny body.

She returned to her desk and continued to type. She thought of babies born to Indian mothers under Chinese conquest, and now Muslim liberation. Indian mothers made her think of Virlomi, and Virlomi made her angry and guilty and frustrated, and a whole host of other emotions that couldn't be good for the baby, so she settled down and returned to her article.

Well. Not her article specifically. Some half-hearted research, and then she poked around the files she already had. When Peter had asked her to take this persona, he hadn't been remotely clandestine about his intent for her to replace his sister Valentine, or how Martel was meant to all but replace Demosthenes. Not that those works of Russophobic genius could ever truly be replaced. But he had allowed her access to Valentine's accounts, to the extent that Val had left them with him. There were depths and recesses of some of these files and accounts that clearly had not been touched in years. A momentary pang of something for Peter shot through Petra, as she imagined him unable to paw through his sister's remaining secrets, after all he had done to her, after watching her leave him. Then again, this was Peter she was thinking about.

Petra herself didn't feel entirely manipulated. She couldn't imagine Peter coercing her into writing these words, and she also couldn't imagine being afraid of Peter, not unless it was in an abstract, reluctant time-for-a-coup sort of way. Then again, Valentine Wiggin had not been much like Petra, from what she knew about the girl. Nor had she had the legendary military commander of Julian Delphiki behind her. And she had been a little girl when they started, barely a teenager. And she had been kind. Sometimes Petra imagined that the decency Peter displayed, when he wasn't being snarky or sharp or petty, must be what his sister had been like. Because she saw so very little of Ender in him.

Her mind elsewhere, she absentmindedly explored the account. It were mostly full of drafts and backup files. But there was folder, buried deep in Valentine's old account, that was encrypted. Just a simple password encryption, but when she tried to bypass the password, it wouldn't budge. She toyed with the idea of passing it along to Ferreira – or Bean, even – to crack it open, but then she did not. After a moment's hesitation, she composed a message.

From: PetraDelphiki .gov  
To: PeterWiggin%private  
Re: Password

If your sister had had an encrypted file left on her account, might you have known what the password would have been? (Entirely hypothetically, of course.)

-Petra

P.S. It isn't "Ender" or "Andrew" or his birthdate. And I only have two more tries before it locks me out. I mean that I would, were this not entirely in theory.

From: PeterWiggin%private  
To: PetraDelphiki .gov  
Re: Don't have time for this

#1: I have actual governing duties to take care of. Trying to guess my sister's old passwords does not even place on my list of priorities.

#2: Right, because Petra Arkanian is the one I want looking at secret files my younger sister wrote, no doubt, about me.

Peter

P.S. Did you try my name? Ender wasn't her only brother, you know.

From: PetraDelphiki .gov  
To: PeterWiggin%private  
Re: Yes

#1: I have a job as well. A job you assigned to me. And who knows? Maybe granting me access to these files could help me.

#2: It's Petra Delphiki, dimwit. You just typed it up in the "To:" section.

I didn't try your name earlier because it was too obvious and also generally one would choose the name of someone they actually liked as a password. But think about it. Who else are these files for but you? Isn't there some secret, some kind of joke or something, that only you and she knew about?

-Petra

From: PeterWiggin%private  
To: PetraDelphiki .gov  
Subj: OK

Try "squirrels."

Peter

Petra assumed that when she did not reply to him, Peter would understand the password had worked. She had expected some kind of record involving Peter in the folder – maybe a documentation of his more dangerous tendencies. Early-childhood evidence of possible mental illness, perhaps. A part of her didn't want to look, because she did not need any more evidence suggesting a similarity between Peter and Achilles. It frightened her, when she thought about it, how Val was the only person Peter let in to who he really was for a very long time, and now she was gone, disappeared from Earth forever. Achilles had always done the same thing to those who saw him in weakness, except exile had never been as satisfying as death to him.

There was only one file there. Briefly, Petra wondered at the simplicity of the password, how random it had been, how plainly it seemed to evoke the punchline of a juvenile inside joke between siblings. And then Petra opened the file, and she no longer thought it was a joke.

Bean often complained that Peter wasted precious time and resources by making the most out of the very small bureaucracy with which he surrounded himself, but Petra always found it much easier to reach Peter than Bean did. She did not like that, but in this case, it didn't matter to her.

"Oh, wonderful," he said, as she entered his office. "Really, Petra, I don't have time to explain to you my sister's diary, as emotionally compromised as she always was-"

She pressed a sheet of paper onto his desk. He looked at her, then his eyes flickered down to the paper, and he picked it up.

"What is this?" he asked, his voice lowered to a murmur. Something bled out of his face, something that might have been pride but seemed, to Petra, to more accurately be confidence.

Without a word, she settled down in the cushioned seat opposite of Peter's desk, positioning a pillow behind her lower back. "This was the only document in Valentine's encrypted file. There was a system in place which she manually reset every twenty-four hours, but it looks like she disabled that after she left."

There was a silence between them. She saw Peter's eyes scanning the page, from left to write. The pure, vulnerable pain in his eyes was something she had never seen from him.

He placed the paper down flat on his desk, but did not look up.

"I removed the file after I printed this," she told him. "That's the only copy that exists."

He still said nothing.

She shifted, and offered, "You can burn it. It might be cathartic."

He opened a drawer to the side of his desk and laid the paper delicately inside. "Thank you," he said, finally looking back up to her. The mask had returned, although he seemed cooler than usual. "I think I'll keep it."

"Is that a good idea?" she asked, her hands on her belly almost unconsciously. "It's not damning, but you're a politician now. Childhood matters."

"No it's not," said Peter immediately, with emphasis. Petra met his gaze, and then he relented. He almost closed his eyes, then said, "No, I'm sorry. You're right, childhood does matter. That's what I mean. It's not a matter _of_ childhood." He stopped, abruptly.

Petra thought, I am not his therapist. I could walk out right now. But she didn't.

"That letter," he said bluntly, looking up at her, "is the entire point, Petra."

She watched him. "The point of what?"

"Of everything," he said, looking down to his desk. Something about the look in his eye began to border on manic, and she wondered if maybe she _should_ leave, or at least call his parents, or something.

"I thought world peace was the point," she said.

"It is," he replied. "That's the point of the FPE and our constitution. But you and Bean always want to know why _me?_ That's why. Because of that letter."

She stared at him. And then she asked, "So you snaked your way into the political world and hoisted yourself up into an empty title…because of a letter your sister kept that claimed you killed her?"

"She wrote it a very long time ago, I think," he said, without looking up at Petra. "A decade, maybe. Probably more. And she kept it active until the day she knew I'd be too far away to hurt her."

There was a silence. Petra didn't like where this was going, and especially didn't like the pathetic swell of self-pity rising behind Peter's eyes. "You couldn't kill someone if you wanted to," she said dismissively. "And I know you've wanted to, so my point's already proven."

"Really?" he asked her, something unfamiliar in his expression, but it was not amusement. "Who do you know who I've wanted to kill?"

Petra thought for one second of saying, "Ender," because Bean had told her so much about the Wiggin children. But then she didn't say that. Instead, she laughed, and said, "Me. Bean. Probably Alai and Han Tzu and, I would say, definitely Virlomi."

Peter didn't reply. And then he said, "That's not funny."

"I know," she said. "Humor is my coping mechanism. You should try it sometime."

"Humor?" he asked blankly, returning to his desk, typing something in. "Is that an Armenian word?"

"Well, all right then, Mister Hegemon. I'll leave you to your pining."

"Oh, of course, Miss Arkanian, I'll sit here alone and try to contain my unfathomable lust for your lumpy pregnant body."

"It's _Mrs._ and _Delphiki_, Peter," she said, without getting up. "You didn't even try."

"You kept your last name," he said, looking back at her. There was some tightness around his mouth and the corners of his eyes that betrayed legitimate frustration, beneath his jovial words.

"I also took his name," Petra said. She leaned in to peer at the screen before him. "What are you working on?"

Reaching out a hand to bat her face away, he replied, "Something important that doesn't involve you. Which is to say, anything of any importance at all."

She watched him for a while, leaning back in the seat. And then she asked, "Why do you still use my maiden name?"

"Why does it bother you?" he asked her, without looking up. "Does it make you feel unmarried? Are you afraid you'll fall for my pasty white charm?"

Her hands gently rubbing her stomach, she let out a bark of laughter. "I wouldn't be afraid of you if you were seven feet tall, holding a machine gun, and in charge of men who actually listened to you."

"No," he countered, "you'd fall in love with me. Because I'd be Bean."

"Julian is not," she said, "his height, nor his ability to command, and certainly not whether or not he's holding a gun."

"OK," said Peter, "but that makes up a good percentage of what he is, so."

Neither of them said anything, but Peter made no indication that she should leave, and Petra made no move to do so. After a few minutes of silence, Petra asked, "Why 'squirrels?'"

Peter froze. He tried to hide it, but she saw the instant way every tiny, miniscule, automatic movement stopped, and the tendons of his neck strained, as if he were holding his chest tightly. It did not, however, feel indecent. Peter wasn't holding himself like a soldier, strong and silent even in his suffering - that would have been indecent to watch, to witness a moment of weakness. But of course, Petra knew, nobody had ever trained stoicism into him, and he did not have the study, emotionless grit of a man of war. She waited for him to speak, even, after another minute and a half, she began to suspect that he would not.

And then he said, "Something you said. About a secret between us."

Silence. Petra said, "I thought the two of you had a lot of secrets between you."

"You'd think so," he said, looking at her. Did she detect a note of gratitude in his voice? She could not tell. "But I didn't know Val. I used her. And she liked playing the game, but she didn't like getting played by me."

His knee was bouncing restlessly, and he was staring down at his hands. Petra didn't know how to ask this question without causing him pain, so she didn't try not to: "Would she have ever needed to release that letter?"

"No," said Peter, looking up suddenly at her. But Petra looked back at him plainly, with nothing resembling the judgment he had reflected back onto himself for a long time. He sat there, and then he confessed, "Yes. Maybe. I don't know."

Petra said nothing.

"Not after Ender left," he said. "I-" he broke off, then looked up at Petra. "You know me," he said. "You may not like me very much, and you may not even trust me, but you know who I am. You've read Locke. Did he seem like the kind of man who would murder his own siblings?"

"No," she said fairly, "but did Demosthenes seem like the kind of person who would forego all ambition to be kind to an injured brother whom she loved deeply?" Peter didn't reply. "Those were personas. Don't try to tell me that Martel is coming from some deeply anti-Muslim corner of my soul, because the only reason I'm writing those papers is because you need me to. Which is exactly why you and your sister created Locke and Demosthenes in the first place. Masks are just that, Peter. And you're the one who orchestrated them all."

"Don't you think," began Peter, "if you pretend to be someone who does good long enough, that, eventually, _you'll_ be the one doing good, instead of this fake persona?"

"I think that thought was far too convoluted," she told him.

"I think most of my thoughts are far too convoluted," muttered Peter. "That doesn't stop me from thinking them."

"It's comments like that which make me confident that I bet on the right horse."

"Let me know how that bet works out. I could use some extra cash."

She leaned in towards him, which was slightly uncomfortable, considering her pregnant belly. "You're not pretending to be Hegemon," she said. "You don't get the liberty of saying, Surprise! Just kidding! I want to go home now."

Wounded, he replied scathingly, "That's not what I mean."

"Then what?"

"When I was ten years old," he said, his voice sharp, "I told Ender that I would kill him. I told Val that one day when we were old and grown up, Ender would have a tragic accident, and she would hate herself for thinking that maybe, just maybe, doting, loving older brother Peter was responsible. When I was twelve I shot at animals with a BB gun and I killed them. And when I was sixteen I penned an essay that had my brother sent away forever, and Val went with him because I was crazy. I controlled her for years. She didn't leave because she loved Ender, she left because she was terrified of me."

"She loved Ender," said Petra.

"I loved Ender," he said, without blinking, without tearing her gaze away. "That doesn't mean he was safe."

Petra refused to feel the tension in the air. Calmly, she said, "He's safe now."

"He's where I can't hurt him," said Peter. "Who made that happen?"

"Did you think you were going to kill him?"

"I thought he would be nothing if he were here. I've read the reports. I've seen the vids. The war broke him. Are you going to try to tell me otherwise?"

"No," answered Petra. "But I will tell you that you're trying to blame yourself for something that did good, not bad."

His eyebrows shot up, in actual, honest surprise. "You think what I did to him was an act of _kindness?_" he asked, with a note of contemptuous incredulity in his voice. "It was self-control, at best."

"What are you trying to prove to me, Peter?"

The drawer beside him banged loudly as he slid it open again, and he did not close it, sweeping the paper into his hands and clutching it before Petra. "Do you see this?" he demanded. "This is not a gesture of reconciliation. This is not my _dear_ sister relieving me of my guilt. This is an accusation, Petra, of doing exactly what I always threatened to do." He slammed the drawer shut and dropped the paper on his desk, leaning back in his seat, distressed. "Thank God I had the foresight to keep that account from someone who could have done real damage with it."

"Oh, very flattering, thank you."

He was silent. He pressed his fingers against his right temple and looked down at the paper before him. "I hate her," he said, with no ounce of resolve, "for choosing him over me. But I shouldn't be surprised. I have no right to be."

"You were a child," said Petra.

"So were you," replied Peter. "You saved the world, and I put both my siblings through years of abuse. I know how Ender feels about me. I know exactly what the Fantasy Game showed him."

Petra did not know what the Fantasy Game had shown Ender, but she did not ask. She placed both her hands on her belly. "In ten years," she said, "I will forgive this baby anything it has ever done. There is nothing on Earth it could do to make it unforgivable. In twenty years, whether it's dying of my husband's condition or healthy and strong, I will forgive anything this baby has done. I've been to Battle School. I know what children are capable of, and I know that there is nothing so bad that you don't deserve to be saved."

"You sound like my mother," he said.

"I am a mother," she replied. "Or about to become one. Maybe motherhood gives you faith."

"Maybe the only way you could justify bringing a child with Bean's condition into this world is through belief in a higher power."

"You know," she said, "I'm starting to understand why Ender and Valentine hated you so much."

He laughed bitterly. "You don't," he told her. "Because you're not afraid of me. You were afraid of Achilles, but not me. Why is that?"

"Achilles never hated himself for what he did."

"You don't know that."

"Achilles loved himself," Petra said. "And he loved the power he had over other people. How can you compare yourself to him, when you hate what you did to your sister?"

This sent him almost aghast with insult. "How can _I _compare myself to him? All you two ever do is tell me how close I am to _becoming _him."

"But you didn't," said Petra.

There was a silence between them. Peter asked, "Do you have a lighter?"

"Naturally. Because, as you know, I've taken up smoking since implanting an embryo in my womb."

"This'll do," he said, and he fed the letter through a paper shredder beside the bin next to his desk.

"Amazing," said Petra. "Federal agencies would have a field day reassembling whatever's in that trash, I'm sure."

"Letters from my parents," replied Peter. "If they have to say something humiliating like 'I love you' or 'We're proud of you,' I make them write it down."

"So you can save it forever?"

"So nobody can overhear. And I don't have to hug them in return."

"I can see the headlines now: Peter Wiggin, Doesn't Like Hugs. It'll ruin your campaign."

"What campaign?" he asked, eyes flashing. "I don't get elected. Hopefully, after me, no one ever will."

She considered this for a moment, watching him. And then she got to her feet, bringing her pregnant belly with her. "Peter," she said, "you will be a very lonely man when I go into space."

"Petra," he replied, "I can't remember a time in my life when I was not a lonely man."

"Don't flatter yourself. You still have a few years and a couple inches to go before you're no longer a lonely _boy_."

"Bean is a lucky man," he said.

"Julian is dying," said Petra.

"Everybody's always dying," he said, with a shrug. "I couldn't tell you why Val was always so scared of it."

"I can't forgive you for what you did to your brother and sister," she said.

He shrugged. "So we're in the same boat."

"I mean I can't give you that. I don't care what you did to Ender, because it's no worse than what happened to him after he left. But if you spend the rest of the life pretending to be good because you're scared that you're really not – then you haven't proved anything, except that maybe she was right, after all."

She watched him.

"You have it in you to be good," she said. "And the first step is knowing that you've done what you've done, but also knowing that you'll never do it again."

He began, "Of course I won't-" but she cut him off.

"If you were sure," she said, "then you wouldn't ask yourself how you're different from Achilles. You would know. If you were sure, then you would know your sister didn't leave you this letter for you to brood over."

At this, he stopped. He met her eye. "That letter was a self-fulfilling prophecy," he said. "She was always going to need it, whatever happened."

"She didn't need it," Petra told him. "Only you could've guessed that password. She wasn't accusing you, Peter. She was forgiving you. She was letting you go."

"With a letter accusing me of killing her."

"With a letter meant to remind you that you _didn't_."

He looked away. "What a kind, merciful, brotherly act, that I didn't murder my siblings."

Petra went to the door, although she could sense he did not want her to leave. "She didn't have to forgive you," she said. "This is something you can waste, if you wish. Your sister may have been scared of you, but you know what Ender did, and so does she, and she still loved him. I think you're forgetting that it's just as likely she was scared _for_ you, as well."

She waited for just a moment, and then she left his office, and Peter was alone.

* * *

As always, my Enderseries fic is mostly about Peter, and largely about forgiveness and redemption. Because a part of me still struggles with reconciling Peter in Ender's Game with the great man he became in the rest of the Shadow series.

The title is an oblique reference to "Forgiven" by Alanis Morissette: "_If I jump in this fountain, will I be forgiven?_


End file.
